1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the management of virtual machines. More specifically, the present invention relates to managing system resources available to a virtual machine.
2. Background of the Related Art
In a cloud computing environment, a user is assigned a virtual machine somewhere in the computing cloud. The virtual machine provides the software operating system and physical resources, such as processing power and memory, to support the user's application. Provisioning software assigns virtual machines based on the amount of storage required to store the application and the amount of storage to execute the applications.
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a system 10 including a group of servers or other compute nodes 12 in a “cloud” environment as a pool of resources for users. The compute nodes 12 within the cloud are in communication over the network 13 with a boot storage device 14 that provides the guest operating systems and applications for the users. The provisioning manager software 16 resides in the management node 18 and allocates boot storage within the storage device 14 to contain the maximum number of guest operating systems and associate applications based on the total amount of storage within the cloud. For example, if each guest operating system and its associated applications require 1 GByte of storage and the additional memory space needed to execute those applications is 1 GByte, then each virtual machine 20 requires 2 GBytes of memory storage. If the total amount of memory storage within a physical compute node 12 is 64 GB, then the provisioning software 16 assumes that each physical compute node 12 can support 32 virtual machines 20. It is assumed that the processor within the physical compute node 12 is able to execute multiple virtual machines 20 concurrently.
The Director Server 22 within the cloud structure is the entity that manages and allocates the operating system, licenses, and associated applications to all virtual machines 20 within the compute nodes of the cloud structure. The Director Sever 22 obtains the physical attributes of all the compute nodes 12 within the cloud structure and provisions the operating systems and applications within the storage device 14. The management interface 24, which is typically an Ethernet interface, provides the physical interface between the cloud and the Director Server 22. A command line interface or web interface (CLI/WEB) 26 allows administrators to monitor the configuration and dynamically change it depending on network conditions. Within the network cloud, network switches connect the vHardware compute nodes 12 to each other and to the management node 18 and the associated provisioning manager 16. The Director Server controls the overall provisioning of operating systems, licenses and associated application by communicating with the management node 18 and provisioning manager 16. In actual practice, the management node 18 and provisioning manager 16 reside in an industry rack full of compute nodes while the Director Server controls multiple racks of management nodes 18, provisioning mangers 16 and computer nodes 12.